One of the events I attended last weekend in Kendal was The Write Comic Stuff, with Ed Brubaker and Kurt Busiek, two of the USA’s best known comic writers talking about their craft. UK comic connoisseur Paul Gravett was the host, and with the combined, immense knowledge of all three men the talk provided a fascinating insight into the different processes of scriptwriting for this wonderfully malleable medium.
Something Ed Brubaker said about his writing really got me thinking about my own.
Ed said that a writer is either an architect or a gardener (with he himself being a gardener); defining an architect as the writer who plots out the story as a whole, and a gardener as the writer who lets the story unfold and grow as they go along.
I thought about this and wondered: how does that apply to a cross-media writer like me?
I often describe my writing as architectural. I talk about shape and structure in my scripts as being paramount for their strength and honesty. If you don’t have the structure right, then you can’t dress that structure properly – with emotion, drama, intrigue, or whatever it is that the narrative requires.
But just as important in my method is the ‘space’ I write into my scripts that gives the artist I’m writing for the room to play. And whilst the creation of those spaces might sound like an architectural act, it’s actually a very organic process: and necessarily so. I say necessarily, because these spaces are very tricky places to get right. They have to balance direction with freedom in order to support the process of true artistic collaboration. They have to be able to flex and react and accommodate. They have to unfold and grow….
So I’m not quite sure what kind of writer this makes me?
Something Ed Brubaker said about his writing really got me thinking about my own.
Ed said that a writer is either an architect or a gardener (with he himself being a gardener); defining an architect as the writer who plots out the story as a whole, and a gardener as the writer who lets the story unfold and grow as they go along.
I thought about this and wondered: how does that apply to a cross-media writer like me?
I often describe my writing as architectural. I talk about shape and structure in my scripts as being paramount for their strength and honesty. If you don’t have the structure right, then you can’t dress that structure properly – with emotion, drama, intrigue, or whatever it is that the narrative requires.
But just as important in my method is the ‘space’ I write into my scripts that gives the artist I’m writing for the room to play. And whilst the creation of those spaces might sound like an architectural act, it’s actually a very organic process: and necessarily so. I say necessarily, because these spaces are very tricky places to get right. They have to balance direction with freedom in order to support the process of true artistic collaboration. They have to be able to flex and react and accommodate. They have to unfold and grow….
So I’m not quite sure what kind of writer this makes me?